Since early 2014 I’ve been playing together with the band Parne Gadje. A group of skilled virtuosos with a passion for music. With influences from balkan, middle east, and hints of punk here and there now the band can also put organic electronics to that list. Using audio recorded on the streets, in nature, around the house, or synthesised digitally in whatever way possible, I feed the ears of the audience an additional layer of sound to the story the the band is already telling. I program every digital instrument to play with live. Every now and then I also just grab an acoustic instrument to play with. Varying from qarquabou, to santoor, from jawharp to doumbeck. Otherwise the usual sounds of mercedes 508 engines, throatsinging, falling gravel, crashing metal trash or granular synthesis of breaking wine glasses are performed with. An awesome blend. For me it’s the first group to perform with using a laptop and some form of digital controlling and I’m loving it.

In the meantime we’ve done shows at several festivals and theatre’s and collaborations with De Waterlanders among others. Always a blast with these lads!

Using several music-technological tools I am creating a serie of so called unusual songs. Two of them are already audible on my Soundcloud page.

For “Beautiful Thief” I used Max to create a simple granular synthesizer, which I controlled using a light sensor with a lamp to scroll through a vocal sample and a single fader to set the length of the grains.

“Set Me Free” is a serial composition using phasing as a composition technique.

The harmony of “Lit” is solely dependent on a simple algorithm that was based on an analysis of the harmonic lines of a series of Bulgarian folk songs. Later I found out this was an existing technique called Markov Chaining. I made it in Max so that I could directly import the midi induced chords in my DAW.

Making music with a painting as a score.
Scrolling through some musical material in Jackson Pollock’s painting: Summertime.
Max/MSP’s Jitter scans the colors in the painting and makes several instruments play.

One of the two reverbs used is actually not the reverb of an acoustic room, in fact it’s the reverb from an string-instrument called Santoor. it gives a beautiful long, tonal reverb.